I have NTFS partition...

At the command prompt, type


That might be what you're looking for...

This program only: detects NEW bad sectors and inform how many clusters these NEW bad sectors have.

I need program, which will count ALL bad sectors, including these in metadata and show me space consumed by these bad sectors...

It will only detect (and mark) new bad sectors when you specify the /R switch.

If you run chkdsk without any command-line parameters, it will show the current amount of bad sectors (and the space allocated by them).

Since we're on the topic, I would find an app that rechecks previously marked bad clusters on NTFS useful. I have 664k of them on my Quantum Fireball, and I'm *sure* they're bogus.

I don't really fancy backing up, formatting and restoring 40G of junk for the sake of 664k though. Ugh

Hmm, I read somewhere that each and every hard disk manufactured on this planet has "some" bad clusters. That's because there is no fabrication process that can manufacture hard drives without 'hurting' them one bit. The difference is that these sectors are 'hidden' by the manufacturers-probably by specifying the locations of these sectors within the drive's firmware such that no data is EVER stored there. This is where S.M.A.R.T technology comes into the picture.

However, there are some programs which can bypass this security feature and can locate the bad clusters and report them to you. The point I am trying to make here is that what your hard drive might be perfect and you might turned the S.M.A.R.T feature off in the BIOS. Try turning it on and see if your program can now locate the bad clusters. You probably don't have to worry because your drive might be perfect in every sense.

There are cases when your disk develops "bad clusters" due to some electrical problems like spikes. Performing a low level format on such a drive often eliminates them, as the disk is not actually, physically damaged.

As far as my recommendation for a program which locates bad cluster and recover data from them goes, I would really, really, really recommend SpinRite 5.0 available at here. However, SpinRite works onFAT, FAT16 and FAT32 only-not NTFS. Tough luck >_<. Also, the price of SpinRite is very high. You might buy it only if there is some important data that you cannot back up or afford to lose. If you can, simply backup your data and perform a low level format of your drive. Hope this helped. Bye

P.S: I remember reading all this somewhere. If anybody thinks all this is utter crap, please feel free to invalidate this post entirely .

Bad sectors are sectors, for which the drive returns read or write error.
All modern drives have additional spare sectors and use them transparently in case one gets damaged -
they mark the bad ones in internal table, which is only readable through SMART.
If the software manages to get a bad cluster,
then it means that ALL spare sectors got used up or the drive didn't hotfix the error.
In any case, it's very bad, as more errors may follow soon!
You can read SMART data with SpeedFan. The value you want to check is 'Reallocated Sector Count'.
If it got lower than the threshold, then you should buy a new drive ASAP.
(Actually, if anything is lower than threshold, you should consider a new drive).